.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  He and Serenity figured out what the horses were carrying at the same time, and both men lurched into jogs, cleaving the gap between the bunkhouse and the cook shack where a couple of drovers sat on upended logs, smoking and drinking coffee, one dabbing at a wound on his cheek with a handkerchief.

  “Hey,” the wounded man snarled, turning his head toward the freighters with an angry start. “Where’re you two goin’ in such a damn . . . ?”

  “I do believe your friends are back,” Serenity said through ragged breaths as he and Cuno passed the two loafers and headed into the hard-packed ranch yard.

  “Company!” someone yelled from a corral behind the blacksmith shop.

  Two hands leapt down from the corral west of the shop, where they’d apparently been posted to keep watch with new rifles, jumped into the yard suddenly, and sprinted west. A couple of other men filtered out of the stables and the bunkhouse as the horses thundered into the yard, sweat-lathered and wide-eyed, the buckskin and one dun buck-kicking savagely and crow-hopping as if to rid themselves of the bundles on their backs.

  “Grab ’em!” roared the big, bearded blacksmith, Hahnsbach, reaching for the dun’s reins. He wore a black leather apron over his buckskin breeches, and the sleeves of his linsey tunic were rolled up to his bulging biceps.

  The men were shouting now, and the horses were whinnying and the mules were braying inside the stables. Cuno had set his rifle and shovel down against the bunkhouse. He rushed the buckskin suddenly and grabbed its reins up close to its bit. The end of the reins had been tied around its saddle horn.

  “Ay-yi,” Serenity said, crumpling his face as he moved up to the buckskin’s right side.

  A body dangled across the saddle, gloved fingertips nearly brushing the ground. A three-inch, hide-wrapped braid curled up over the back of the dead man’s head. Two arrows protruded from his back. What had caught the brunt of Cuno’s attention was the top of the man’s head, which was as red as freshly butchered beef where the scalp had been hastily sliced and ripped away.

  “Son of a bitch!” Hahnsbach cried when he, too, saw the grisly cargoes strapped to the back of each of the five horses. Just loudly enough to be heard above the hoof stomps and chuffs and frightened knickers, he added, “Murderin’ savages !”

  Cuno knelt down beside the buckskin and lifted the chin of the man draped across its back. The blood-smeared face and half-closed eyes and slack-jawed mouth of Henry Kuttner stared back at him, salt-and-pepper hair curling along the sides of his hacked-up head.

  Feeling as though he’d been punched in the gut, Cuno released the foreman’s chin, letting it slap back down against the buckskin’s latigo strap, and straightened. He looked around at the other horses, all carrying arrow-pierced dead men surrounded by ten or so drovers and the Chinese cook, all regarding the grisly cargoes with looks ranging from disbelief to rage.

  No one said anything.

  The men, some holding the reins taut, moved slowly around the horses. The horses stomped and blew and fidgeted nervously. Flies had found the blood, the coppery stench of which filled the mild late-morning air. They swarmed loudly over the bodies and the bristling arrows.

  A half dozen magpies swooped over the horses, cawing hungrily.

  There was a gagging sound. Cuno turned to see the big blacksmith, Hahnsbach, bent at the waist and upchucking his breakfast into the freshly churned dirt. No one else said anything; they just sidestepped around the horses or stood dumbfounded beside the dead men, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around what their eyes were telling their brains.

  Distant shuffling footsteps sounded.

  Cuno raked his gaze from the body of Henry Kuttner hanging slack down the buckskin’s side to the big lodge sitting bathed in clear golden sunshine at the mountain’s base, smoke still unspooling from its big stone chimneys.

  Logan Trent was making his way down from the house, limping and dragging one boot heel. He was dressed as he’d been dressed last night, in baggy denims with a clawhammer coat over a doeskin tunic embroidered in red and blue thread. From his broad hips hung a Colt Long Cylinder conversion with pearl grips and a big bowie knife in an elaborately beaded buckskin sheath. On his curly, silver head he wore a black stovepipe hat boasting a red-tailed hawk feather.

  He came on grimly, the lump on the side of his nose looking larger today than it had yesterday. His eyes were pinched and dark. He raked his gaze across the horses, and his men sort of shuffled back away from him slightly, looking somehow guilty and dread-filled.

  The rancher stopped at the edge of the grouped horses, his back to the hulking, sun-blasted lodge, brown hands on his hips. His flat chest rose and fell heavily, and his mouth was a long knife slash beneath his silver mustache.

  The horses blew and stomped, and the flies buzzed.

  Behind Trent, a young boy ran out on the lodge’s front porch. The woman who’d driven the wagon into the yard earlier gave a shriek, bounded out after the boy, and dragged him back inside, slamming the door loudly behind them, the wooden bang not reaching the lower ranch yard till a full second later.

  Trent didn’t look back. He continued to rake his brooding, angry gaze across the frightened horses.

  Finally, his gaze holding on the buckskin that Cuno stood beside, he moved up to the horse, bent low, and lifted Kuttner’s head by the fringe of rawhide-wrapped braid at the back.

  Trent worked his jaws from side to side, and his eyes glinted angrily. “Henry, damn you. How could you let this happen, you son of a bitch?”

  “Easy, Trent,” Cuno said, barely able to contain his own rage.

  If the scalpings and killings were anyone’s fault, it was Trent’s. He’d lived in this country long enough to know better than to send men after the raiding Indians. He should have known they’d ride into a massacre.

  The old rancher was off his nut. Too many long winters. Too much time alone out here.

  “Goddamn you, Henry!” Trent raged, glowering down at Kuttner’s scalped head. The rancher removed his hat and swiped it hard across the foreman’s head and shoulders. “How could you do this to me?”

  Cuno stepped forward. “Trent.”

  The rancher continued to pummel his foreman’s bloody head.

  “Trent!” Cuno grabbed the man by his coat lapels and shoved him straight back. “If you wanna blame someone for this, blame yourself.”

  Trent’s face swelled with rage. “Unhand me, young firebrand, or I’ll—”

  Trent tripped over his own feet and he would have fallen if Cuno hadn’t held him upright. When he saw that the rancher had regained his balance, Cuno let him go but he stood there, only two feet away from him, staring up into the taller man’s gray eyes with challenge.

  Trent’s eyes sparked with untrammeled fury, and he started to raise a fist when one of the other men shouted, “Boss!”

  Cuno and Trent whipped their heads around to see the man pointing across the corral of milling ranch horses. Cuno’s throat tied itself in a knot when he saw five braves sitting five short-legged, broad-barreled Indian ponies side by side across the main trail, on the near side of the ranch’s wooden portal—close enough so that Cuno could see the sun reflecting off their heavily painted faces as well as the new Winchester repeaters in their hands.

  13

  INSTANTLY, CUNO AND the other men clawed their pistols from their hips and looked around wildly, expecting to find a horde of the red devils swarming onto them from all directions.

  But there were only the five, sitting their war-painted ponies at the south edge of the ranch yard, staring with silent menace toward Cuno, Trent, Serenity, and the shuffling, exclaiming waddies.

  As Cuno sidestepped toward the west edge of the yard, continuing to swing his cautious gaze in all directions, he got a better look at the five braves. All five were painted for war, with feathers braided into their long obsidian hair, which framed the brick-red ovals of their faces. They wore wolf or bear or coyote skins from head to their furry
moccasins, though one brave wore patched denims.

  Quivers bristling with feathered arrows jutted up from behind their necks, bows were slung over their shoulders, and war clubs dangled down their thighs. But in their hands, resting butt down against their hips, were the Winchester rifles they’d taken off Kuttner and the other men they’d recently killed. The smooth, freshly varnished stocks and oiled receivers glistened in the cool, high-country sun.

  “Oh, for chrissakes,” Trent groaned.

  Instantly, Cuno saw what the rancher saw. From the barrels of the new Winchesters dangled five scalps, four in various shades of brown. The fifth one, of wavy pewter, had belonged to the foreman.

  When the breeze jostled the grisly trophies, Cuno could see their bright red undersides.

  His gut clenched, and he squeezed the ivory grips of his Colt in his right hand. The five were just out of pistol range, and Cuno and the ranch hands had all rushed into the yard with only their six-shooters.

  Trent had edged up toward Cuno, making scuffing sounds in the dirt as he dragged his right boot, and, his big, pearl-gripped pistol cocked and extended in his right fist, he yelled at the Indians, “Where’s Leaping Wolf?”

  The Indians said nothing. They just stared brashly toward the ranch yard, their molasses-colored eyes unreadable within the bizarre rings of war paint. One of their ponies shook its head and blew. The wolf snout resting atop its rider’s head jostled from side to side, dead jaws set in a perpetual snarl.

  “I said, where’s Leaping Wolf, you cow-eyed savages?” Trent quickly translated the question into Ute, or what Cuno took to be Ute, but repeated the trailing insult in English.

  Trent’s face and chest swelled. He adjusted his grip on the big conversion pistol in frustration as the five Indians merely stared back at him as though he weren’t there.

  Finally, one of the braves—a stocky Ute with high, ridged cheeks and wearing a bearskin tunic and Levis, with the cuffs stuffed down into high, brightly beaded doeskin moccasins trimmed with rabbit fur at the top—gave a grim smile. A couple of teeth appeared between his leathery lips. Then, in unison, all five swung their horses around, touched heels to flanks, and galloped west, heading back the way they’d come.

  No doubt riding off to join the rest of their band hunkered down behind the near ridges, trapping the ranch hands and Trent and Cuno and Serenity at the base of Old Stone Face. With nowhere to run or hide even if they were inclined to.

  The Utes’ hoof clomps dwindled gradually. They rounded a second curve, about a hundred yards across the valley, and disappeared, their dust sifting behind them.

  “Want we should go after them, Mr. Trent?”

  It was one of the hands who, holding the reins of a dead rider’s horse in one hand, his Smith & Wesson .44 in the other, narrowed a sharp eye at his employer, unshaven cheeks lifting with an oily smile.

  “There’s only five,” the waddie added. “We could catch ’em before they rejoin their group.”

  Trent said nothing. He continued staring after the braves for a long time. Then, as though awakening from a trance, he cast his faintly chagrined, coyote-like glance at the hands staring at him expectantly.

  Trent didn’t look at the man who’d spoken, however. He raised his voice to the group. “Grab your rifles and spread out. Make a complete circle around the ranch yard, anywhere there’s cover. Use two quick shots to signal an attack.”

  “What about the dead men, Mr. Trent?” asked the ex-army surgeon, Riker. “Shouldn’t we bury ’em?”

  “We’ll bury ’em tomorrow,” Trent growled as he wheeled awkwardly on his bad leg and started up the grade toward the lodge. He stopped so suddenly that he almost tripped over his bad leg and drilled that owly gaze at Cuno. “Massey.” He jerked his head toward the house. “We got an important matter that needs discussin’.”

  He turned again and continued limping on up the grade.

  Cuno glanced at Serenity, frowning.

  “Now, what’d you do?” the graybeard asked.

  Cuno hiked a shoulder. “Maybe he doesn’t like the rifles, ’specially when they end up in the hands of the Injuns.”

  As the others, including Serenity, began cutting the dead men out of their saddles, Cuno tramped to the bunkhouse for his rifle. He brushed dust and hay flecks from the ’73’s scratched stock and octagonal barrel, then set the rifle across his shoulder and headed back into the yard.

  The magpies were winging over the dead men whom the living men were dragging into the stables as they looked edgily around for more Indians, muttering amongst themselves, snarling like coyotes starting to turn on themselves.

  There would be a bloodbath soon. The Utes had gathered their cards and were waiting around, probably just out of sight in the valley, to play their final hand. No point in hurrying. Why not let the white eyes sweat a good, long time before they gave up their topknots?

  Cuno walked slowly up to the house, looking around and listening, seeing nothing but sunlight and sage and occasional dust devils when the cool breeze stirred. When he got close to the house, he could hear a woman’s voice upstairs—probably that of the woman who’d brought the kids in earlier.

  “That’s Mrs. Lassiter. She’s upstairs with Michelle.”

  Cuno stopped in his tracks and dropped his eyes from one of the upstairs windows to the porch. Trent sat in a deep wicker chair, skinny legs crossed, smoking a briar pipe.

  He had a stone mug of coffee and a small uncorked bottle of rye whiskey on an overturned barrel beside him. Also on the barrel was his old conversion pistol. An 1860s-model single-shot buffalo rifle leaned against his chair—a long, heavy gun that probably fired a thumb-sized bullet of around seventy grains of gunpowder. Good at long range but overkill up close, and the breechloader was slow to reload.

  “How is your daughter, Mr. Trent?” Cuno said, continuing onto the porch and climbing the steps.

  Trent shook his head slightly, frowning and puffing his pipe. “I’m leaving her to Mrs. Lassiter. Can’t bear to go up there now myself. Poor girl’s never experienced such horror. Have a chair. Would you like a cup of coffee? Run done made some fresh. I like it with a jigger of rye these days. Takes the sting out of my hip, no thanks to a green-broke stallion I, at my age, never should have been trying to finish off in the first place.”

  “No, thanks.” Cuno crossed in front of Trent and moved to the far west edge of the porch, from where, through some scattered cottonwoods and cedars, he could see past a hayfield to the open valley beyond. “My stomach’s feeding on itself the way it is.”

  Trent chuckled—a low, slow rumbling.

  Cuno glanced over his shoulder at the man. “Isn’t yours?”

  “Of course.” Trent frowned angrily now, that knot alongside his nose swelling. “A man’d be a fool not to be afraid with them Injuns on the lurk. They’re out they’re waitin’. I can smell ’em. Leapin’ Wolf’s band and several other bands he probably called in from Wyoming. Gonna give us white eyes our just deserts.”

  Trent chuffed a laugh again and he lowered his eyes bemusedly. What the hell was he laughing at? Cuno wondered. Cuno saw little to laugh at. In fact, since watching Trent’s daughter mauled on Trent’s own kitchen table, he’d found nothing to laugh about this morning at all.

  Cuno turned his head back westward. His eyes saw Indians in every rock shadow and breeze-jostled twig. His palms were perpetually sweaty. “You said you wanted to talk to me, Trent.”

  Behind him, only silence. Cuno turned to see the rancher staring solemnly west. Not like he was seeing anything except maybe a memory or two. Maybe memories of when he first came to this country and beat this ranch out of the brush.

  Cuno said, “Trent?”

  The rancher turned to him slowly, his gray eyes glassy. Suddenly, he blinked, and recognition returned to his gaze. He removed his pipe from his teeth, knocked the dottle onto the wide-boarded floor, and lifted the coffee mug from the table.

  “What would you say to hitchin’ up one
of your wagons and getting my daughter and the Lassiter kids the hell out of here?”

  “Out of here?” Cuno almost laughed. The man really was crazier than a tree full of owls. “You’re hemmed in by Indians on three sides, might even be some behind the house. Even if you aren’t totally surrounded, in case you haven’t checked recently, you’ve got one hell of a high granite ridge behind you. The only way outta here is to fly, and my wagons haven’t sprouted any wings.”

  Trent sipped his coffee, then sucked the moisture off his mustache. “There’s a way through the ridge about one mile north. About six years ago, an earthquake widened a natural cleft. Slid the mountain apart like Moses partin’ the Red Sea. Just wide enough for a wagon and a team of mules. Once you’re through the cleft, you still got a piece o’ work ahead of you, climbing and windin’ through the Rawhides, but you can make it with the wagons. I’ll draw you a map.”

  “Where might we be heading?”

  “I want you to get my daughter and the Lassiter kids over to Fort Jessup on the eastern slopes of the mountains. It ain’t much of a fort, just what’s left of a tradin’ post, but the army usually keeps about fifty men and a Gatling gun there over the winter, to monitor the gold camps as well as the Injuns in this area.”

  Cuno studied the rancher. Trent stared back at him, and there was little of the folly that had been in his eyes a few moments ago. He looked clear, and he looked serious.

  “I’ll pay you,” the old rancher added with a faint air of desperation. “A thousand dollars in addition to that draft I already wrote you. Cash.”

  “You don’t think you have a chance here?”

  Trent shook his head. “I know Leapin’ Wolf. Made a truce with him ’bout fifteen years ago, after ten years of skirmishing with his cow-stealin’ braves. He’s a hard man. What my men did to his daughter . . .” Trent shook his head again, and his eyes turned dark as he cast his look westward again, across the valley toward the mesa. “. . . He hasn’t even started to get even for that.